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Only 4% of UK games industry staff are female

The proportion of female videogame industry staff in the UK has dropped from 12 per cent in 2006 to 4 per cent last year, according to a new survey.

The British Sociological Association, highlighting results found by University Of Liverpool PhD student Julie Prescott, believed that the reason for the decline was a culture of long hours in the games business.

43 per cent of the 450 surveyed women claimed their well-being had been negatively impacted by the amount of time spent working.

32 per cent of respondents claimed to work in excess of 45 hours a week, 22 per cent between 46 and 55 hours and 10 per cent more than 56 hours a week.

79 per cent of the women surveyed did not have children, while 69 per cent were under 35.

Said Prescott on the decline in female staffers working in game animation, coding, design, engineering and indirect roles such as marketing and HR, "Reasons given for intending to leave the industry tended to suggest women are dissatisfied with their organisations and working environment."

"Flexible working practices would not only improve the image of the industry as a family-friendly working environment, but could also assist in retaining more women, especially women with or considering having children.

"Changing workplace structures, as well as improving childcare provisions would enable both genders to have active careers."

Prescott's study also established that just 35 per cent of female industry employees had degrees - a stark contrast to trade association TIGA's 2009 report that 60 per cent of UK developers.

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38 Comments

Not entirely convinced of this as the root cause of the lack of women in the industry, though I don't doubt it's a problem. Whilst the industry does have a long hours culture, and this may well have contributed to the numbers of women in the industry dropping to 4%(!), it simply begs the question - why was it ever as low as 12%? I think the findings in the report would not be unique to the games industry.

I can't speak for other disciplines, but as a programmer that 1 in 10 female to male ratio was alread WELL established by the second or third year of university.

There are industries with similiar or worse childcare and working hours challenges (in the UK at least) where the gender ratio is even or tipped slightly in female favour - medicine, for instance (most medical students are now female). My wife is a doctor, and her job was always far more difficult to work around than mine from a childcare point of view, yet a huge number of her peers are women, many of whom have kids.

There's something more fundamental at work, particularly in the programming discipline. To be honest, there definitely seems to be fewer female artists and designers than one might expect as well.

I don't believe long hours are the reason either. Most major studios have certainly got their act together in this regard. I'd also wager that there are much more women involved in casual, social, web, online game development than 'core gaming' studios, which I imagine were the basis of the survey.

Also, especially on the art and animation front, I'd have thought the real figure is much higher than 4%. I know a fair few female artists and animators who, after having kids, have gone freelance, and so may not show up on these figures.

@ Nick - When was the last time you heard a negative connotation about a doctor or someone in the medical field? Compare that to 'prgramming' or 'computer games' and i think that's part of the answer right there.

Becoming a doctor is related to intelligence, respect, knowledge, useful, wisdom, caring, social, wealth, power. Becoming a games developer is related to immature, childish, useless, waste, harmful, unsocial, boring, hard. There are probably other words and feelings associated with the two professions but i'd bet if you did a survey of the general populace the above words would come up quite frequently.

Honestly not sure how you tackle this other than keep putting out positive 'feelers' to the public. In time, and as the generations progress, gaming will become more mainstream and more easily accepted and at that point it will also become more inclusive.

[edit]
I think that often, your perception of your job will affect how easily you want to stay/leave the job. While there may be many negatives of being a doctor the perceived bonuses more than make up for that whereas, i would speculate, game industry jobs do not.

Edited 2 times. Last edit by James Prendergast on 8th September 2010 10:58am

James I'm absolutely in agreement about the social connotations being part of the appeal of medicine, and part of the games industry's lack of appeal to women. I offered medicine as a counterpoint to the argument that ease of childcare is a primary factor in a woman’s choice of career. It’s a factor, but isn’t, I think, the dominant one in the case of the games industry. In fact, I think your point touches on a potential root cause more closely.

Software engineering as a profession has more general problems attracting women (and about which screeds and screeds has already been written), and this feeds into the games industry's statistics, but the games industry probably has specific problems. Just on an intuitive level - we all know that despite the domain-specific aberrations of online and casual gaming, traditional gaming (from whose ranks most game developers will be drawn) remains mostly a male pursuit, and still isn't viewed kindly by the media and the wider public. The games industry lacks the social cachet of other media industries, which leaves it mostly recruiting from those already bought into what it produces – i.e. gamers.

I suspect that once (if) the games industry reaches the same level of social acceptance as film and television, we’d see a significant rise in the female workforce within the industry, but I think it will still be lower than it perhaps should, being in large part a software-based industry.

Again, just to reiterate, I am aware I'm neglecting the other disciplines in this. I'm just not as aware of the numbers involved nor any potential issues in the art/design/test/production worlds.

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Nick McCrea on 8th September 2010 11:16am

After 12 years in the industry, I left mostly because I was sick of having to travel all over the UK to work. With the relative volatility of the industry and only a few studio hot-spots UK-wide, it's very hard for a woman in a two-career relationship to be as flexible as the industry requires them to be. I was 35 when I left development, and childless. I dont' really want children but at least now I have the option, whereas it was unthinkable when I was working in games.

I left development and a career I loved when I had children. I tried to go back part time but realised that it was simply impossible to do the job I needed and wanted to do in the hours I had available to do it in. Many development roles in particular are not able to be done part time/in flexible hours at present. Other creative and demanding industries have systems/job shares etc in place to allow women (or men of course) to continue working with young children (and many go back fulltime when the children get older) but this seems to be rare in development. Maybe because there are so few women in games there isn't the push to look into the options available to keep women in the industry once they start a family.

The growing list of comments above have already related the comments I had in mind to post.

The survey notes that 43% of polled women felt their well being was negatively impacted by their work hours (just for humor's sake, note that the percentages given after that suggest that many of those that complained of the hours had to be working a regular 40 hour work week). But I wonder if the survey asked questions related to the social stigmata of the video game industry, the gender allure of software development as a whole,etc...?

I hesitate to suggest, and readily expect to be shot down, but can it be that there aren't many women in games simply because a large proportion of women (however much they may like games) are simply not interested in being games developers? I'd say it was comparable to the number of male nurses, since we are using the medical profession as an example. And games/gamers definitely have a stigma upon them, which has possibly grown over the past few years with new technologies allowing serious hardcore gaming. I think this attitude has possibly extended to the way developers are perceived. I hesitate also to suggest that the idea of an entirely male orientated workplace is perhaps not as appealing to women as a man might find working in a company full of women.

I know for one that I personally would never have considered such a career had I not been offered my position, but although I am no more interested in games than when I started, in retrospect it is a job I love and I will readily tell anyone so. I think the creative and artistic freedom I have as an artist in this industry is more than I would ever get in film, perhaps if these benefits could be weighed more over the perceived downsides then maybe potential females might find the idea of working in games more appealing.

I wonder how these statistics compare against other IT-driven industries, notably IT consultancy, the banking sector or outsource teams that work for banks or blue-chip investment firms. In my experience the gender ratio is heavily male. Furthermore, these industries often rely on employees to work hours that are just as untenable, and potentially more-so than those that exist in the gaming industry, with the potential to earn lucrative bonuses (as my friends often like to remind me, swines...).

Like Jimmy, I would be interested to assess the social stigma to game development and indeed software development as a whole. During periods of employment I have found far more women that operate in a IT-lite environment; working with Microsoft products such as Word, Excel and to an extent Access and Sharepoint. I sincerely doubt that this is due to capability, but rather that they are unwilling to explore an area that is still considered a male-driven industry.

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Tommy Thompson on 9th September 2010 7:30am

I think of this as a chance for new studios, rather than expecting a shift from the established ones.
For existing developers it works like this: we have 12% female staff, why bother with flexibility for those? A couple of years later they have 4% and think to themselves, thank god we didn't invest in flexibility for women. That's a huge waste of talent in my opinion but they seem to manage fine with the game industry still being one of those magical entertainment industries to students.

The number of female gamers is growing and so will the interest in working in the industry. Let a couple of women start their own studios with respect to the required flexibility for those people who can and would have children, I believe we could see some great games coming from there. After all, women surely know what women want and there's a big audience for games "for women".

I am a game designer and a mum. It might be my only valuable contribution to this industry but it is possible to do it! At the moment I work 3 days a week. With my employers, we've worked out a way to do it and that's it. It is totally doable. You need to be well-organised on both side but there are ways to do it...

I love my job and I give it a 100% and I don't see why becoming a parent will change that - of course I can't do as much overtime as I used to but I just got to be more efficient and organised and better at multi-tasking (btw, skills I had to quickly developed to survive as a mum). It shouldn't be that you have to leave your job the minute you can't work 12 hours a day (there are also a lot of dads at Rocksteady) - How do you want this industry to evolve if we don't stick at it and grow with it? I also think that the long hours culture is not only preventing female staff to join and stay but also preventing talented male employees to join because they know they'll get better treated elsewhere...

I agree with Nick about this industry needing to mature to attract more women...The game industry is still viewed by many as a toys for boys or a nerd career options (not very sexy) and this might prevent talented people both make and female to join. We need some proper re-branding exercise to show that games are growing up and are becoming fantastic and complex forms of entertainment and not just 'bang bang your dead' (we still need some of those of course but not only ;-)...)... If we show off the quality and depth of games like Uncharted 2 or Limbo for instance then maybe different people including women might be interested in joining this industry and if ,once in the industry, these people decide to stay or choose to work for companies with real professional attitude to work then we'll get there... little by little... and then surely we'll succeed in making games the amazing, grown-up form of entertainment they deserve to be.

I honestly think that if they asked 450 men in the industry the same question, those men would also say that their life had been negatively impacted by overtime. Is anyone not at least slightly negatively affected by working long days, not getting out of work until it's already dark, and seeing a lot less of your loved ones that you would like? As for most women commenting that their reason for planning to leave the industry is dissatisfaction with their working environment, I don't really think that that's a gender-specific answer either.

In regards to Kevin's point that it would be unethical to hire a woman over a man purely to increase a percentage, I completely agree. A person should be hired purely on their merit, not on them simply being part of an underepresented group. However, there really should be more of an effort to encourage women to apply in the first place. It would be interesting to know what the percentages are like for job applications to positions in the industry. I'm pretty certain it isn't 50/50 or even anywhere close. How can we judge the merit of a person if they never even think to apply?

I know many women who love games, with a passion rivaling that of many of my workmates, but they would never apply for a job as a developer because they see it as a boy's club where they simply wouldn't feel comfortable. That really is a preconception that needs to be addressed before we see a change in the balance of women to men.

I also think Antony Cain is spot on about the generic avatar defaulting to male being a classic sign of what is wrong.

I've walked into interviews for testing roles and seen the look on one on the interviewers face that says 'but...... but...... you're wearing a skirt'.

I've also seen recruitment adverts with taglines that say 'Puts the testosterone in testing'. In what is a very visual industry perception is key and the view that some companies portray will not attract female staff. It makes you wonder if they actually want to.

I think that it all boils down to women being a lot more pragmatic about the use of their time. This means, in general terms, that women can't be bothered to waste eons noodling to get their head around a new broken API, newfangled language, chasing async bugs or working around the bugs on the latest version of a software package you are forced to use like most guys obsessively do. They also tend to take a healthier look at the separation between work and "real life". They tend to pursue happiness and not excellence above all.

As a guy who was in the games industry and is now (with a good degree of reluctance) on a "normal" software company, I can tell you the ratio is the same outside games. On the R&D department we recently lost the only female we had as a colleague - we're now 30-odd guys. The company has many other female employees, but the ratio decreases as you move away from occupations where you can "just get your job done" (like finance, marketing or G&A) to "fight the computer" depts (solution delivery still has some women, but as I mentioned, the prod dev has none).

So it's not really just a games thing: it has to do with how much grind you have to do to get your job done. And women are just smarter than us in saying "can't be bothered".

I think there has also become a lack of opportunity especially when you get to a certain level. It's very difficult, for example, to break into a director level role at a publisher or developer as a woman. With so much of the work disappearing overseas and many of the UK based head offices closing I saw the old boy’s network kick in and the same old faces turn up together. After 18 years I get better pay and shorter working hours outside of the games industry. The downside is it’s an environment that lack the same passion, energy and creativity that I have only ever seen around games.

One really nice quote
"Initially computer science was dominated by women, and cross-culturally there are places in the world where, until recently, computer science was dominated by women. But now, in the U.S., the stereotype of the male computer science nerd can be off-putting to women. It's very easy to assume that the characteristics you see [in the portrayal of] your profession are necessary for you to participate in it, but that might not necessarily be the case."

Thanks for the link Kim. There were some really interesting points in the article that a lot of people don't normally pick up on. I especially like this one:

"You write that one of the obstacles that women face in the field of math is something called "stereotype threat." What is that?

It refers to the difficulty for people who belong to a group stereotypically seen as being not very good at a particular thing they're trying to do. For a woman doing a math test, she has an acquired stereotype threat that if you do badly, people are going to judge you because you're a woman and that you're going to confirm what everyone already "knew," that women are bad at math. It creates a whole host of harmful psychological effects in people's minds. And psychologists have discovered if you make gender seem not relevant to a task, then men and women perform equally well. Right now, when it comes to women in traditional male domains, it's like a track star running into a headwind — their performance is impeded."

I would say this definitely applies to the myth that women can't play games.

I am so impressed in the quality of the dialogue on this issue. It seems in North America, this topic gets a rather perfunctory treatment at best, and at worst it reverts to mud slinging. I find this topic fascinating, as a women leading a studio that is predominately female, catering to a female audience. ([link url=http://www.siliconsisters.ca).]http://www.siliconsisters.ca).[/link] I want to add this observation into the discussion - what is it specifically about engineering schools that is apparently so inhospitable to women? I've known a number of women drop out of engineering, and it seems that there is a cultural component to this decision. I lived in Montreal during the massacre at Univeriste de Montreal Ecole Polytechnique where a male engineer applicant who had not been accepted chose to blame the female students who got in for ruining his life, and separated the men from the women, murdering 14 female students. At the time, many felt that this was the extreme expression of a sentiment widely felt at engineering schools across North America - that women were not welcome. I've heard that Europe is more open that the the field of engineering has a long history of female involvement. I welcome your input and comments.

I agree with Brenda about the quality of dialogue. This is the first string of comments I read from start to finish in years. A lot of people have made very valid observations and arguments. So many so, it would be impossible to respond to them all.

One of the remarks I did agree with greatly is about the validity of the survey. I've read quite a few articles that claim to encompass gamers as a whole, but actually only chose say, 100 Everquest players to represent ALL MMO players. Or they've chosen FPS addicts to play a platform and some survey ensues.

On a whole I feel the industry isn't as mainstream as it requires for it to get the diversification everyone's wondering about. I avoid reading tech news feeds because so much of the gaming industry coverage from generic sources just annoys me. This strange bubble the rest of the world lives in where it takes a decade or so for someone to clue into the tech advancements. Maybe the root of the issue isn't gender interests and gender pragmatisms, but perhaps it's the fact that the stigma of being a gamer has been so negative for so long that other industries don't want to touch you. Employers outside of the games industry don't see a history/interest in gaming for what it is (pro problem solving, lateral thinking, healthy sense of competition, creativity and versatile social networking skills - depending on your poison). I've read one too many articles about why you should never hire a WoW player or how lazy gamers are and how socially inept they are.

The industry is cluttered with a bunch of misconceptions perpetuated by the people who have never been involved with it. It takes some time for these things to fall into order. Reading was perceived poorly for decades, rock'n'roll as well for decades, television too; now it's gamings time. Society needs something to blame its failings on and be afraid of destroying their children. Gaming is stuck in that position at the moment and that may be the root of a lot of the issues.

In ending, I may be living in the UK now, but I grew up in Canada. One minute of silence was held every year during my stay in education on the anniversary of the shooting and I hope it will continue in remembrance.

This discussion has been rated M for mature audiences by the GIBRB (GamesIndustry.Biz Rating Board). Take note publishers.

Volume of games with the M or equivalent rating released per year? Less than 10%.
Volume of hype, marketing, media attention, controversy, stigma stemmed from games with the M or equivalent rating? Almost 100%

Now this may be a misconception on my part and I'm sure Kim Blake can correct me if needed, but I do believe that women mature faster than men. The M maturity found in this very discussion, to be precise. And given the predilection for the video game industry to take a hard focus on the immature version of M, it stands to reason that women may be less interested in being involved in many segments of it...not just development.

I run a community with 33,000 members and oversee our media network. 4% would likely represent our own volume of female members and staff. And I consider ourselves slightly more mature than the average forum and media outlet. I've seen other communities nearly as large and not an active set of XX chromosomes among them.

I feel that for women to attain any significant advances in the development workplace sex ratio, the industry as a whole needs to do a lot of maturing. The GIBRB kind.

I'm new to working in the games industry but I'm an old hat web developer. I entered the games industry knowing that its a male-dominated world. I have no problem with that. My experience as a woman working generally in male-dominated industries is that if you're good at what you do, you can move forward and also enjoy your work, regardless of your sex. This has been my experience working in the UK and I'm a mum of two.

I agree with Marissa; all the developers I've worked at have had way more men than women, and for the most part it hasn't been any sort of problem.

That said, Jimmy I think your point about the community is an interesting one: the mismatch between 'the community' (or communities, rather) - which seems (I stress seems) mostly immature and frequently unwelcoming to women or indeed anyone else differing from the straight white male - and the developers - mostly intelligent, creative, thoughtful and pleasant people - is astonishing.

If women thinking of a career in games are judging us by the forums and what's said in online play, I'm not surprised they don't want to know!

I have to admit this is the first games related topic I've commented on and I've enjoyed reading the different contributions.

My experience of working in a testing environment has been a positive one too. It's so nice to work with so many people that have shared a love of my favourite games, characters and consoles. This is something I never had when I worked in graphic design and I think it's quite unique.

When I first started playing games it was about family entertainment, this changed over the years and games were marketed more exclusively to men. While I do think there has been more of a shift back to family gaming with the DS and the Wii, and more recently with the launch of Move and Kinnect; it will take time for the balance to shift.

I've read another article on another site that is based on these same statistics and the comments were not so positive. You have all the usual stereotypical lines being dropped. These are definitely the people that put a lot of women off and when they feel they are in the majority they are their loudest. So I suppose one thing is for us all to get across the alternative as much as we can.

Honestly, it's not just women who don't want to be associated with the kinds of people/behaviour you're talking about :)

5 minutes on any form of multiplayer game and I wish I was a different species to them, never mind social group; it's the whole "normal person + internet anonymity = moron" thing that you really don't have to deal with in many other situations.

Like Stacey just said, games are much nicer (healthier?) when you take them off the web and into the living room.

I should have said 'more exclusively to a certain type of male gamer'. ;) I think you can still have family gaming and online together. As families grow up and move away they can keep in touch this way.

It does seem though that some of the experiences women may be having as gamers may be putting them off working in the industry too.